man-db-2.9.0

[Bruce Dubbs]

New minor version.

[Bruce Dubbs]

man-db 2.9.0 (23 October 2019)

Major changes since man-db 2.8.7:

Fixes:

• man --recode and manconv now adjust encoding declarations on the first line of their input to refer to the new encoding.

• Fix comparison of candidate manual pages to correctly handle the case where the language elements are the same and match the locale, but the territory elements differ.

Improvements:

• Many typographical improvements to man-db's own manual pages.

• Rewrite parts of man(1) to make it a more accessible introduction.

• If run with no arguments or only a section, man now suggests running "man man".

• man now understands the <page>(<section>) form on its command line, so for example "man 'chmod(2)'" is now the same as "man 2 chmod". While this requires more quoting, it may also be more convenient when copying and pasting cross-references to manual pages.)

• manconv now guesses the input encoding based on the file name if it is not explicitly specified.

• There is a new "man-recode" program. It fulfils a purpose similar to "man --recode", but has an interface designed for bulk conversion and so can be much faster when used on a large number of pages.

Compatibility notes:

• Remove the ability to undefine COMP_SRC at build-time to disable reading compressed manual pages. This was always only a micro-optimisation, and it wasn't worth the extra code complexity. You can still configure without any compressors (either by not having them available at build time, or by configuring with "--with-gzip=" etc.) to achieve much the same practical effect, although the test suite still requires at least gunzip.

[Bruce Dubbs]

Fixed at revision 11695.